Chimamanda Adichie - Americanah

“Thank you for helping Mummy, Uncle, but I don’t think I’ll be having any chicken.” He had his mother’s playful manner.

“Look at this boy,” Ojiugo said. “Your uncle is a better cook than I am.”

Nna rolled his eyes. “Okay, Mummy, if you say so. Can I watch TV? Just for ten minutes?”

“Okay, ten minutes.”

It was the half-hour break after their homework and before their French tutor arrived, and Ojiugo was making jam sandwiches, carefully cutting off the crusts. Nna turned on the television, to a music performance by a man wearing many large shiny chains around his neck.

“Mummy, I’ve been thinking about this,” Nna said. “I want to be a rapper.”

“You can’t be a rapper, Nna.”

“But I want to, Mummy.”

“You are not going to be a rapper, sweetheart. We did not come to London for you to become a rapper.” She turned to Obinze, stifling laughter. “You see this boy?”

Nne came into the kitchen, a Capri-Sun in hand. “Mummy? May I have one please?”

“Yes, Nne,” she said, and, turning to Obinze, repeated her daughter’s words in an exaggerated British accent. “Mummy, may I have one please? You see how she sounds so posh? Ha! My daughter will go places. That is why all our money is going to Brentwood School.” Ojiugo gave Nne a loud kiss on her forehead and Obinze realized, watching her idly straighten a stray braid on Nne’s head, that Ojiugo was a wholly contented person. Another kiss on Nne’s forehead. “How are you feeling, Oyinneya?” she asked.

“Fine, Mummy.”

“Tomorrow, remember not to read only the line they ask you to read. Go further, okay?”

“Okay, Mummy.” Nne had the solemn demeanor of a child determined to please the adults in her life.

“You know her violin exam is tomorrow, and she struggles with sight reading,” Ojiugo said, as though Obinze could possibly have forgotten, as though it were possible to forget when Ojiugo had been talking about it for so long. The past weekend, he had gone with Ojiugo and the children to a birthday party in an echo-filled rented hall, Indian and Nigerian children running around, while Ojiugo whispered to him about some of the children, who was clever at math but could not spell, who was Nne’s biggest rival. She knew the recent test scores of all the clever children. When she could not remember what an Indian child, Nne’s close friend, had scored on a recent test, she called Nne to ask her.

“Ahn-ahn, Ojiugo, let her play,” Obinze said.

Now, Ojiugo planted a third loud kiss on Nne’s forehead. “My precious. We still have to get a dress for the party.”

“Yes, Mummy. Something red, no, burgundy.”

“Her friend is having a party, this Russian girl, they became friends because they have the same violin tutor. The first time I met the girl’s mother, I think she was wearing something illegal, like the fur of an extinct animal, and she was trying to pretend that she did not have a Russian accent, being more British than the British!”

“She’s nice, Mummy,” Nne said.

“I didn’t say she wasn’t nice, my precious,” Ojiugo said.

Nna had increased the television volume.

“Turn that down, Nna,” Ojiugo said.

“Mummy!”

“Turn down the volume right now!”

“But I can’t hear anything, Mummy!”

He didn’t turn down the volume and she didn’t say anything else to him; instead she turned to Obinze to continue talking.

“Speaking of accents,” Obinze said. “Would Nna get away with that if he didn’t have a foreign accent?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know last Saturday when Chika and Bose brought their children, I was just thinking that Nigerians here really forgive so much from their children because they have foreign accents. The rules are different.”

“Mba , it is not about accents. It is because in Nigeria, people teach their children fear instead of respect. We don’t want them to fear us but that does not mean we take rubbish from them. We punish them. The boy knows I will slap him if he does any nonsense. Seriously slap him.”

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

“Oh, but she’ll keep her word.” Ojiugo smiled. “You know I haven’t read a book in ages. No time.”

“My mother used to say you would become a leading literary critic.”

“Yes. Before her brother’s son got me pregnant.” Ojiugo paused, still smiling. “Now it is just these children. I want Nna to go to the City of London School. And then by God’s grace to Marlborough or Eton. Nne is already an academic star, and I know she’ll get scholarships to all the good schools. Everything is about them now.”

“One day they will be grown and leave home and you will just be a source of embarrassment or exasperation for them and they won’t take your phone calls or won’t call you for weeks,” Obinze said, and as soon as he said it, he wished he had not. It was petty, it had not come out as he intended. But Ojiugo was not offended. She shrugged and said, “Then I will just carry my bag and go and stand in front of their house.”

It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money.

One day, after she had rushed off to take Nna to his piano lesson, she called Obinze to say, laughing, “Can you believe I forgot to brush my teeth?” She came home from Weight Watchers meetings to tell him how much she had lost or gained, hiding Twix bars in her handbag and then asking him, with laughter, if he wanted one. Later she joined another weight-loss program, attended two morning meetings, and came home to tell him, “I’m not going there again. They treat you as if you have a mental problem. I said no, I don’t have any internal issues, please, I just like the taste of food, and the smug woman tells me that I have something internal that I am repressing. Rubbish. These white people think that everybody has their mental problems.” She was twice the size she had been in university, and while her clothes back then had never been polished, they had the edge of a calculated style, jeans folded away from her ankles, slouchy blouses pulled off one shoulder. Now, they merely looked sloppy. Her jeans left a mound of pulpy flesh above her waist that disfigured her T-shirts, as though something alien were growing underneath.

Sometimes, her friends visited and they would sit in the kitchen talking until they all dashed off to pick up their children. In those weeks of willing the phone to ring, Obinze came to know their voices well. He could hear clearly from the tiny bedroom upstairs where he lay in bed reading.

“I met this man recently,” Chika said. “He is nice o, but he is so bush. He grew up in Onitsha and so you can imagine what kind of bush accent he has. He mixes up ch and sh . I want to go to the chopping center. Sit down on a sheer.”

They laughed.

“Anyway, he told me he was willing to marry me and adopt Charles. Willing! As if he was doing charity work. Willing! Imagine that. But it’s not his fault, it’s because we are in London. He is the kind of man I would never even look at in Nigeria, not to talk of going out with. The problem is that water never finds its different levels here in London.”